Lockout flashback: Proceed with caution

The Ottawa Senators started the lockout-shortened, 48-game schedule of 1994-95 with oodles of optimism.

After being the clown princes of the NHL for the first two years of their rebirth, they thought they had turned the corner.

During the lockout, owner Rod Bryden had emerged as one of commissioner Gary Bettman’s right-hand men, giving the franchise a sorely needed boost of credibility.

The arrival of three new defencemen — Chris Dahlquist, Sean Hill and Jim Paek — was supposed to help a team that had allowed a league-high 397 goals the season before.

“If we’re going to be competitive — and we are — if we’re going to challenge for the playoffs — and we are — we’ve got to be better on defence and I think we have done that,” said general manager Randy Sexton.

And the young players who were being regarded as the cornerstones of the fledgling franchise — Alexei Yashin, Alexandre Daigle, Radek Bonk, Stan Neckar, and Pavol Demitra — were supposedly ready to lead.

“There’s so much future for us,” said coach Rick Bowness before a 3-3 opening night tie with the New York Islanders.

“And that’s the first time we’ve been able to say that. This team is going to be fun to watch.”

Well, not so much.

It wasn’t too long before Bowness was looking to take those words back.

The fact of life in a short season is that it’s a sprint from the opening bell. Stumble early and the race can be over quickly.

It’s something that present coach Paul MacLean will be thinking about as he approaches this lockout-shortened schedule.

The Senators of 1994-95 thought they were ready.

To stay focused, they broke the schedule into eight six-game segments, setting specific goals for each segment. And during their abbreviated training camp, they had a sports psychologist, Terry Orlick, on hand to talk to any player who wanted to talk. They wanted all heads pointed in the right direction.

Alas, after the opening-night tie, it all went downhill in a hurry.

They lost nine of their next 11 games and were well out of the playoff race by the end of February, by which time they had won just two of 17 games. It was another season of misadventure and calamity, just as the first two had been.

For the third season in a row, the Senators (9-34-5) finished as the worst team in the league, with 14 fewer points than the Anaheim Ducks.

In hindsight, the foreshadowing of a messy 1994-95 season was there for all to see.

It got off to a rocky start when Alexei Yashin, who refused to rejoin the team after the lockout, held out until the eve of the first game. The team had to hold its charter flight to Long Island for 25 minutes to wait for him.

He only agreed to join the team after his agent Mark Gandler, Bryden, and Sexton shook hands on a deal to provide Yashin with performance bonuses (thought to be around $400,000) for reaching individual and team goals.

If he reached those goals, the club also agreed to renegotiate his five-year, $6-million contract in the off-season. That agreement would ultimately lead to another contract dispute with the Russian star, but that’s another story for another season.

For one brief moment, the tie against the Isles seemed to suggest that the pre-season optimism was justified.

But three nights later in Hartford, the air came out of the balloon with a 4-1 loss that should have been a lot worse.

It was such a comedy of errors that at one point during a second-period Ottawa power play, when Yashin lost his stick and raced to the bench for a new one, no one had their wits about them to hand him another stick.

“We didn’t have enough guys going,” said Bowness.

He never would, and not even the biggest gamble of his coaching career — benching Yashin and Daigle for a Feb. 17 game against the Tampa Bay Lightning — would help.

The move divided the organization. Sexton was said to be against it, but Bryden cast his vote with Bowness. For appearances, Sexton publicly supported Bowness.

“Each person has so many tools in his tool box,” said Sexton. “One of the tools Rick has is benching players. He has talked with both of them one-on-one several times and they didn’t respond.”

The Senators would win that game, 2-1, the first time they had ever defeated their sister franchise — Lightning general manager Phil Esposito called it the most embarrassing loss of his playing or management career — but the price in acrimony was high.

Two days before that Tampa game, after a 2-0 loss to the Florida Panthers, Ottawa’s veterans, led by captain Randy Cunneyworth and alternate captain Troy Murray, gave both Yashin and Daigle a stern dressing now.

Jumping in to defend Yashin, Gandler said that Cunneyworth and Murray, with a combined three goals, had no business criticizing Yashin, who at that point of the season had eight goals.

“They should just go to the bathroom and look in the mirror and throw up,” said Gandler.

Gandler was also incensed at the team’s lack of support for Yashin after his father Valeri was in a serious car accident on the Queensway on Feb 8. He broke three ribs in that accident.

Yashin played in that night’s game against the Montreal Canadiens at the Civic Centre. He accepted condolences from Montreal coach Jacques Demers but nothing, said Gandler, from his own team.

“Nobody stood up for him at a time when he most needed help,” he said, comments that drew a sharp response from Yashin’s teammates.

“When he arrived we supported him 100 per cent,” said Sylvain Turgeon. “We’re a family here, we stick together. Everyone’s behind him, no matter what his agent says.”

This simmering ill will was barely below the surface as the team slumped through eight- and 16-game winless streaks.

One of the worst nights might have been an 11-4 loss to the Quebec Nordiques at the Civic Centre on March 26. The Nords didn’t gloat in victory.

“We knew it wasn’t one of their best nights — and they knew it wasn’t one of their best nights,” said Mike Ricci, who had a goal and three assists.

But there was no hiding the fact that the Senators were not close to being in the same league as the Nords.

“I don’t know if we were that bad — or they were that good,” said Murray.

“They scored about 10 highlight goals out there. Give them some credit.”

The Senators couldn’t even win off the ice.

Four days after that loss to the Nordiques, the Senators limped into Buffalo for a game against the Sabres. They needed to recall three players from the farm club in P.E.I. because of injuries to Norm Maciver (concussion), Dennis Vial (ankle), and Lance Pitlick (rib).

But when Michel Picard, Steve Larouche and Darren Rumble arrived in Buffalo nine hours and three airports later, they were forced to watch the game from the press box because their equipment bags — which were untagged — were still at the Halifax airport.

“It’s bad luck,” said Larouche. “We were all ready to play so badly.”

Vial was forced to play on a tender ankle and the Senators got hammered for the second time in three games, 7-0.

Finally, on April 7, the trade deadline, the Senators officially threw in the towel.

The Senators thought these trades would give their fans hope for the future, but Stromberg would never play a game for the team, Laperriere would play only 19, and Straka would play 49 before being traded the next season.

But if the Senators were destined to be the league’s doormat once more, the hockey gods were not yet through with them. There was one more laugh to squeeze out of their woebegone season.

On April 21, with only a week to go in the season, a fire in their equipment room at the Kanata Recreation Centre caused an estimated $20,000 in damage.

The next day, with a 3-2 win over the Islanders, the Senators went on their best run of the season, winning five of their final seven games.

The irony was not lost on anyone.

When their socks and towels went up in smoke, it was the only time all season that the Senators had caught fire.

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